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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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The Protestant
Reformation was an event of world historical significance that has shaped
modern society in profound ways. Many of the defining characteristics of contemporary
economic, political, social, and religious life may be traced back to the
seismic shifts that occurred in sixteenth-century Europe as a result of the
Protestant revolution. The Reformation has also shaped our university in
profound ways, a fact that is evidenced by the inscription on the cornerstone
of our chapel. This inscription reads: “Valparaiso Memorial Chapel, in the Year
of Christ 1959, the Four Hundred and Forty Second Reformation Year, Jesus
Christ Himself the Chief Cornerstone.” Here we see a direct link between the
Reformation and our chapel, which is intended to be the spiritual center of our
campus.

But
what exactly was the Reformation? What was it fundamentally about? What lay at
the heart of the Reformation? And what does this heart have to do with us today
at Valpo, 500 years later? Why should we care? Why should you care? I want to
try answer these questions in a way that I hope will make sense to you.

Let’s
take up the final question first, why should you care about the Reformation?
I’d like to suggest the following intentionally provocative answer: you should
care about the Reformation because it has the potential to significantly
improve your love life!

So,
let’s talk about your love life a bit. What do you do if you want someone to be
attracted to you? Doesn’t it work pretty much like this? You see someone in
class or on campus and you say to yourself, that’s the one for me! He is so
handsome, so smart, so interesting, and so cool. I want to be his and I want
him to be mine! Or, she is so beautiful, and so intelligent, and so funny. I
want to be hers and I want her to be mine! And so what do you do? You try to
make yourself attractive to that person because that’s the way human love
works, right? We are attracted to people we find attractive. You go to the gym,
study more diligently, comb your hair, brush your teeth, and pray that he or
she might just notice you, for there is nothing greater in life than loving and
being loved by the beloved.

The
heart of the Reformation is the simple but life-changing belief that God’s love
does not operate this way. God’s love does not require or allow the kind of
strenuous effort we exert when we seek to persuade another human being to love
us. There is no such persuading involved in one’s love relationship with God.
It is in this way that the Reformation can improve your love life, by which I
mean, your life of loving and being loved by God, in the first place, and then
of loving and being loved by others.

Listen
to how Martin Luther compared human and divine love at the Heidelberg
Disputation in 1518, which took place just a few months after the 95 Theses
appeared in 1517 and a few years before The Freedom of the
Christian in 1520:

“The
love of God does not find, but creates that which is pleasing to it. The love
of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.” A pithy if
somewhat obscure statement, wouldn’t you agree? Here is how Luther sought to
clarify it: “Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and
bestows good. Therefore sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are
not loved because they are attractive” (LW 31: 57). According to Luther, fallen
human love is always at root self-seeking, whereas God’s love is always
self-giving, always seeking the good of the beloved regardless of the beloved’s
moral condition. In other words, we do not have to make ourselves attractive to
God in order for God to love us. We are not able to do so, and God does not
require this of us, in any case. God loves us precisely in our unloveliness—our
habitual moral failure—and God’s love makes us lovely in God’s eyes.

You
see, Luther had worked extremely hard to make himself attractive to God. He had
sacrificed a career in the law to become a monk and had then engaged in all
manner of religious exercises as he sought to persuade God to love him. But he
failed and became extremely frustrated with God. In fact, he tells us that he
came to hate God. That’s right, the father of the Protestant Reformation, the
guy whose Reformation inspired the founding of our university and the
construction of our chapel, once hated God. Why? Because he thought that God
expected him to become perfectly lovable in order to earn divine love. This
belief drove Luther to rage and to despair, for he knew he could never achieve
this goal. But then, through intense study of the Bible, the reading of some
good books, and the wise counsel of some good friends, Luther was rescued from
his anger and despair. It was the insight that he did not have to persuade God
to love him—that God had in fact first loved him long ago—that changed
everything. Luther tells us that he felt born again when he arrived at this
realization.

God
is in the business of loving the unlovely, of loving in a totally unconditional
way, because God is Himself self-giving love at His very core—that is the
fundamental Reformation insight. In order to enter into a relationship of love
with this God, Luther thought that one simply had to accept that one was
unlovely, morally speaking, and place one’s faith in God. And Luther thought
that God’s love would draw forth this confession and faith from the
individual—God would make them happen.

But
according to Luther, this divine love is a very costly love, and it comes to us
in the last place we would expect to find it: in a man who lived 2,000 years
ago and who was brutally executed on a cross. I am referring to Jesus Christ,
of course, who according to Christian theology is the Son of God in human
flesh, come to take death and all of its consequences upon Himself and to give
life to all who live in the shadow of death, which is basically all of us. For
Luther, Jesus Christ is the supreme expression of God’s self-giving love. God’s
radical, unconditional love is a cruciform love, that is, it takes the shape of
the cross, of Christ the God-man on the cross. That’s where we find God and His
love, even though it makes little sense to our natural way of seeing things and
may even offend us.

I
am a Reformation scholar. That’s my job, to teach and write about the
Reformation. This year I have been searching for a way to convey the radical,
cruciform love of the Reformation to our campus. As I have cast my mind and
eyes about, I have landed on what I think is an especially fitting symbol of
this love: the Homeless Jesus sculpture, which is located on the lawn just west
of the Union. In this sculpture, the crucified Christ is wrapped in the cloak
of a homeless man and rests alone on a bench. I think the presence of this
sculpture raises some really important questions for us as we collectively try
to take stock of the Reformation and what it might mean for us today. Here are
some of these questions:

The crucified God inhabits the central crossroads of our
campus in what Mother Teresa would call His “distressing disguise.” He has come
to us. Have we noticed Him there?

Why has the crucified God come to us in this way? Might it be
to draw our attention to the marginalized in our midst and the way we
frequently pass them by? Luther taught that the experience of God’s radical
love for us was supposed to motivate us to share this love with others. How are
we doing at passing on such love, especially to those on the fringes of
society?

Or perhaps the crucified God is among us to reveal to us our
own homelessness, our own alienation from our true home and source of love,
which is God. Might Homeless Jesus be present among us to assure us that He has
taken this homelessness on Himself as an expression of God’s deep love for us?
Might He be there to tell us He understands our alienation, even from God?
After all, it was He who cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46) He gets alienation from God and He has provided a
solution to it.

Of what significance is it that Homeless Jesus is located at
the crossroads of campus, common to all, belonging to all, yet owned by no one?
He is not in the chapel. He is a Jesus that belongs to all religions on campus.
Might the location of Homeless Jesus be a sign for us of how the radical love
of God comes to us and seeks us wherever we are, whoever we are, and in
whatever dire situation we might find ourselves?

What is the relationship between Homeless Jesus and the
glorious Christus Rex of the chapel? Might we wish for the consideration of one
to lead to a consideration of the other? Or must the two remain separate at
Valpo? If so, why?

Finally, of what significance is it that there is space to
sit next to Homeless Jesus on His bench? It seems that we have been invited to
join Him on His bench and to sit next to His crucified feet. How might it
change the way we all understand and experience Valpo if we would each sit on
this bench next to these feet and ponder these questions for a while?

My
hope and prayer is that such an act might bring the radical cruciform love of
the Reformation to our campus in new ways.

Ronald K. Rittgers holds the Erich Markel Chair in German Reformation Studies
at Valparaiso University, where he teaches history and theology. He is author
of The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Germany (2012) and The Reformation of the Keys:
Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (2004).
Rittgers is past president of the American Society of Church History.